Weekly Links

Demonstrations and violent police response — “officers with their name tags removed firing stun grenades and rubber bullets indiscriminately at fleeing protesters and bystanders and hunting stragglers through the streets” — continue in Brazil. Raphael Neves warns that the protests are about more than transport fares. “People are going hungry and the government builds stadiums,” quotes the New York Times.

Earlier this month Nick Danforth challenged the conventional wisdom on Erdogan and the Occupy Gezi protests: “Yet the painful irony, for anyone who wants to see Turkish democracy prosper, is that if Erdogan had paid more heed to his critics, his government would not be on the verge of succeeding in a historic effort to end Turkey’s brutal thirty-year civil war with Kurdish separatists.”

Hussein Ibish cheers the Obama administration’s Syrian policy shift, arguing that America’s involvement in Syria is “a completely different kind of engagement and in a totally different context” than the War in Iraq. Daniel Larison disagrees, noting that regional support for American involvement is no where near as uniform as Ibish argues.

ABOUT US

Barbara F. Walter is a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at the University of Denver. Joe Young is a political scientist at American University. Together, they edit this blog to provide simple, straight-forward analysis of political violence around the world.